Havel: Communists Exported 1,000 Tons Of Plastic Explosives

March 23, 1990|By New York Times

LONDON — President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia said Thursday that the ousted Communist government had shipped 1,000 tons of lethal Semtex explosives to Libya, which had passed it on to terrorist organizations.

James Adams, a British expert on terrorism, said Havel's figure of 1,000 tons was much higher than the amount of the explosive previously believed to have been sent to terrorists.

It is believed to have been used to blow up Pan American Flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988, killing 259 people on the airliner and 11 on the ground, and a French DC-10 airliner over the Sahara late last year, killing 170 people.

Havel said it takes only 200 grams of Semtex to blow up an aircraft.

British officials say they believe Libya shipped several tons of it in the mid-1980s to Irish Republican Army terrorists for operations in Britain and Ireland.

Havel, who spoke at a news conference during a three-day visit to Britain, said Czechoslovakia no longer exports Semtex.

''The absurd side of the matter is that Czechoslovakia didn't even make money on it,'' he said. ''It was done on political orders from above.''

An aide said that under the previous government Czechoslovakia had supplied Semtex to all the Warsaw Pact countries, ''and not at market prices, either.''

British officials said the Communist government had claimed to have stopped exporting Semtex in 1982 but had reportedly continued making ''special deliveries'' to East Germany and Hungary until 1989.

Havel said Czechoslovakia would propose that all countries manufacturing similar industrial explosives treat them with chemical markers that would make them readily identifiable through airport sensing devices.

Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jiri Dienstbier, said in January that the country would halt its profitable foreign arms trade immediately, but aides later said he had not meant to imply that Czechoslovakia would not fulfill contracts.